Little Things

Our son and his family live quite a way from here in an idyllic setting on the side of a mountain. Thanks to COVID-19 we hadn’t seen them for well over a year, but once we were all fully vaccinated we’ve been visiting once again.

Just behind their house is a small pond with native vegetation around the edges. The pond isn’t very large, covering about a quarter acre. Like many ponds that don’t have manicured edges it attracts a wide variety of wildlife – deer and otter and mink, ducks, geese, herons and many species of songbirds; it has at least five species of fish, frogs of several kinds, salamanders and a horde of insects.

Because it’s right behind their house we’ve often sat inside and watched the wildlife in and around the pond. This summer our son and I made two circuits on a path around the little pond; we looked for some of the smaller creatures attracted to the pond-side vegetation. This wasn't a careful census or a bioblitz, we were just casually looking to see what we could see.

Some say “It’s just the little things that make life interesting.” There are a lot of large things that also make life interesting, but small things greatly add to life’s enjoyment. Here are just a few of the small things we saw in about 20 minutes –

The real prize of this little excursion came as a surprise; it was the clematis clearwing moth we found in a tangle of vegetation that included wild clematis –

This species appears to be quite uncommon, there may only be one specimen in the Smithsonian's collection and fewer than 75 locations listed in any reference I consulted. To help reduce predation, these attractive day-flying moths mimic some spider-hunting wasps and are therefore probably frequently overlooked by naturalists.

Yes indeed, little things ARE interesting.